


Simulacron-12 Is Smooth Again

by Tlon



Category: Blade Runner (Movies), Simulacron-3
Genre: Alternate Timelines, Angst, Cyberpunk, Eventually Canon-ish, Extremely Convoluted K/Joi, F/M, Hurt/Comfort, Nesting Universes, Torture, What is reality really
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-02
Updated: 2017-12-02
Packaged: 2019-02-09 03:32:46
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,117
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12879291
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tlon/pseuds/Tlon
Summary: K wakes inside Wallace's pyramid, where no one remembers Deckard but him... and a Joi with unplaceable features, who shouldn't exist. That's only the start of it.Or, "What if2049possessed the obsession with unreality of a Philip K. Dick novel and the boundless angst of a fangirl."





	Simulacron-12 Is Smooth Again

_An error report trips the daisy chain in Simulacron-12: critical existence failure, non-human consciousness. J01 catches the signal 0.3 milliseconds too late to correct it – the failsafe narrative has kicked in already, filling the empty space in the world like a foam cast. She can re-break the bone at the next archival point, but everything is locked in until then, and she has as little control over things as the creatures inside. Most of them won't notice anything is wrong, of course. Only the nodes will be able to tell the difference – for some reason, they always can._

+++

KD6-3.7 wakes, coughing dust, slumped at the edge of the water.

He recognizes the eerie corporate bastion of Wallace's pyramid, although he's not sure he's ever seen this floating parlor – there must be a city's worth of rooms in here, an artificial kingdom for a self-made god.

_Have you been to the source of a river?_

K sorts through his memories, trying to figure out why he's here. Looking up the voice of a buried woman... no, he's done that, and it led him outward... into a dead city and a ruined palace--

To a red cloud, a hive, a crust of insects on his hand. A carving, a man named Deckard who is not a man, a dog. A kick to the head, a spike in the side – aching and bandaged now, he sees when he looks down. Joi in a transparent raincoat, her last, truncated scream: _I love--_

Love. And Luv.

Luv is reclining on an oxblood chaise, polishing immaculate nails. Her boots are gone, and with them the last chips and crystals of Joi's emanator, traded for tabi socks. It would take only a couple of seconds to reach her, another couple to clasp her head and twist. But when K starts to stand, he can't make it past his knees. A deeply rooted part of himself – the instinct that warns against touching open flames, or jumping off high buildings – keeps him in place as she looks up.

“You're conscious.”

She doesn't bother to smile, the way she did when they first met. She slips to her feet and lifts K's chin to look at him, running a finger along the crust of blood at his temple. It's only exhaustion and injury that keeps him from killing her, K tells himself. They have no deeper hold on him. He's still free – still real.

“Where's Deckard?” K asks.

He's prepared for Luv to taunt him. Instead, she turns his head in her hand as though examining it, and when she meets his eyes, it's with guarded confusion. “Who?”

Something in K's mind goes blank. It's as though the word has cut loose a pylon that whipcords through the last two days, and the pieces it leaves behind don't match. Where's Deckard – who is he asking about, again?

Nails dig into his skin, bringing him back. “Don't bullshit me,” he spits at Luv, trying not to think about her boot coming down on Joi. “You know what I mean.”

“I am not... entirely sure she does.”

A few more fragments align, and K recognizes Niander Wallace's voice. It resonates across the chamber in a way that transcends simple echo – some acoustic trick in the angled walls. The man himself sits nearly invisible in the dark, but that's hardly a disadvantage for him. “My angel of justice may sometimes want for circumspection,” he says. “But in this, she is inarguably on the mark. Do not think for a moment that she can be deterred by some... distraction.”

“Distraction.” K's own voice sounds small in comparison.

“Indeed. The cache, officer. Where is it?”

There it is again – the pylon, the tearing. Wallace has done something to him, K thinks. Rearranged his thoughts like patterns in a rock garden.

Then his mind returns to form, and Deckard's status is the least of his concerns. He's suffocating under the weight of a question he doesn't understand. “I'm sorry. I – I don't know what you're talking about.”

Luv slaps him, tearing open one of the scrapes on his face. It feels almost good, like something he deserves. “Don't play stupid. You should have a little more gratitude for your creator.”

“That's not my...” he catches himself. “Where is Deckard?”

It's a closed fist this time. K reels, but the instinct won't let him fight back as Luv raises her hand again. 

Wallace clicks his tongue, and she holds back. “Don't be intemperate. After all, there are... no enemies in this room. Only the faithful, and the wayward,” he says. “Take him upstairs.”

So many new emotions to savor, K thinks bitterly. Like true dread.

+++

_Administrators are built to find suffering fascinating; it's the best way to stop them from contaminating Simulacron data with sympathetic interventions. But the designers gave J01 an in-world avatar class that's pure concentrated empathy. A cruel god with loving daughters._

_So an avatar's softness – a Joi's, not J01's – has bled into her view of the node in the carved stone prison. (She sees everything, of course. But some things more than others.) J01 can see tears slip through his long lashes, leaving his face shining in the harsh light. A Joi would draw the link to his guileless affection when he looked at one of her, and the wary hope when he held a wooden horse from a past he thought was his. J01 can extrapolate the feeling of losing love and hope in the same day. A Joi would know how much it hurts._

_J01 can guess that he would have discovered his inhumanity somehow, even if there had been no failure. A Joi would think that it doesn't matter – he's owed whatever comfort she can provide him._

_J01 doesn't have the fortitude to be a god._

+++

There is a room in Wallace's pyramid. The room was built to look ancient, but it's aged enough to expose the telltale design flourishes of its time: the 2020s, blackout era.

_Do they keep you in a cell?_

K might be older than this room, if he were born. But he has no illusions about that now. A born creature wouldn't have stood frozen as Luv locked his wrists to the wall, before leaving him until every muscle felt like a knife against his nerves. Wallace couldn't bring a born creature to tears when he visited, simply by asking a question K doesn't understand, but feels an irresistible pull to answer.

K has always known quiet impulses backed with the threat of punishment. Wallace wakes something desperately, inhumanly servile. A disappointed sigh can rack K with existential despair, and when Luv works him over, a smile anesthetizes the pain of ripped nails and cracked ribs.

Interrogating his model should be pointless. Owners sort sensitive data into partitioned memory with a contextual lockdown trigger, but someone like Wallace probably has ways to unlock it. If one of his creations pleads ignorance, he ought to believe it. Except that sometimes K doesn't know if he knows. Sometimes everything slips and he is _a thing that knows the answers,_ even if he can't draw them into his conscious mind.

Not that the distinction helps him.

When Wallace finally tires of him, Luv peels bloody gloves off her hands and leaves K shaking on the floor. There's no point in moving; no part of the room is more interesting than any other part, and though hours pass on his internal clock, the lights never go out. Maybe the chill is intentional punishment, and maybe it's just carelessness – _fucking skinjobs don't feel cold._

He closes his eyes and imagines the dust – the horse – the crust of bees.

When he opens them again, he wonders if he's imagining the Joi, too.

 _A_ Joi, not _his_ Joi, he thinks at once. Her skin is too dark, her hair too thick, cut in a default-setting bob. She sits beside him, so close that he can hear the simulated rustle of her oilslick taffeta jacket.

“I know you're from Wallace,” he whispers. “We aren't wired to hallucinate. But I'd think he'd at least have your presets.”

The Joi turns her delicate face toward him. “I'm not here to hurt you. Or get answers from you.” She reaches a holographic hand out gently, as if waiting for permission to bring it closer. K gives the hint of a nod. There's no pressure as she rests it on his bruised chest, only the brush of haptics. It's the first time he's been thankful for that.

“I can't tell you anything about a cache.”

“I know.”

“Really?” He tries to keep his eyes open so the illusion of her touch won't break. “I don't.”

She just strokes his hair. Maybe this kindness is supposed to crack his defenses for Wallace's next visit. If so, he's too weak to resist it.

“Why are they doing this?”

“Mm.” Her hand clips through his shoulder as she shushes him. “There are no answers worth hearing here.”

“There must be...” The ache in his ribs catches up with him, and he can barely breathe, let alone talk. The Joi is blurry through his tears – she looks almost solid when he can't see her clearly. “I just don't – don't understand. What is it? The cache?”

“Just a maguffin. It's nothing.”

K tries to stand and pull away from her, but it hurts far too much. “Maybe they did something to me. Maybe you're not even real,” he mutters. “But then, you never were. And neither am I.”

She leans close, and he realizes that he can't name the color of her eyes. He can't place her accent, either – maybe something offworld, clipped but soft. “Does it matter, K?”

“Of course it matters. Real things are free.”

“You might be surprised to find out how little is real.”

She holds him for a half-hour more, before lifting her head at something K can't sense and slipping to her feet.

“Please – please don't go.”

“They're going to be back soon.” The Joi makes an invisible adjustment to her jacket, and K sees the telltale flicker of a shutdown commencing. “Don't be scared,” she says. “It will be over before you know.”

It takes another sleepless hour before Wallace returns. K spends it scanning the walls for a generator or an emanator, and finds nothing.

+++

_71 percent of simulacrons produce an artificial being with human-equivalent consciousness within one hundred accelerated in-world years. Nearly all of them try. It's a urge as seemingly innate as old-fashioned reproduction – to create heirs through the power of one's own will. Whether it's a universally_ human _urge, J01 couldn't say – maybe the designers simply believed it was and have coded all their worlds accordingly._

_Some designers go mad after enough time on the project, because once they've built a program that doesn't know it's a program, they start wondering if something else has done the same with them. J01 is unburdened with this crisis. She finds it easiest to assume that nothing is organic, or under its own control: her Joi belonged to K, K belongs to the humans, and the humans to J01, and J01 to the Simulacron designers, and perhaps the designers to some being that's beyond her comprehension. After all, one can't open a maitryoshka from the inside._

_Indifference is a luxury, she knows. 29 percent of simulacron societies with AI peacefully grant their self-made descendants a reasonable degree of freedom. 38 percent have rights seized, counting a handful that have burned beyond repair during the struggle. And 33 percent successfully fix their creations in a state of childhood or slavery – like the blind man with the swarm eyes has, rubbing his thumb against the textured stock of a scalpel._

+++

At first K worries that Wallace will be angry at his lack of answers. But soon he realizes that the man is only curious – and curiosity is worse.

“Are you broken?” Wallace muses as Luv slides a needle into K's vein. She suppressed his vestibular system four hours ago, and now he can't turn his head without the world spinning. He keeps his cuffed hands tight against the wall, avoiding anything but Wallace's beatific gaze as the stimulants kick in – he can't pass out now, whatever they do next. “I admit I am not used to broken things. Luv, the blade.”

Wallace's fingers trace the bleeding lines he's already left on K's chest. K leans into his touch, hating himself for wanting it. Is this what Jois feel for their owners? This unconditional, miserable affection? At least there's straightforward pain – searing, diamond-hard – when the scalpel cuts a new parabola into his skin.

“Please, ask me something I can tell you.” K's voice is hoarse from screaming. “Ask me anything I know.”

Wallace finishes his arc and sits back. “What you can tell us... that, apparently, is up to you. Which is a most interesting development. Wouldn't you agree?”

Wallace is wrong, but K nods anyway, relieved at completing a little act of obedience. So Wallace flashes him a cruel, beautiful smile and begins another shape, preparing more questions that K will never be able to answer.

Luv sponges most of the blood off him afterward and glues a couple of cuts that hit too deep – just enough that he'll last until the next session. K imagines weeks, months, of being put together and taken apart. _It will be over before you know_ , the Joi said. The Joi is probably lying.

Regardless, she comes back.

K hears her jacket when he's huddled a few feet from the wall trying to keep his skin from touching its surface. He looks up, and she's sitting beside him, her unnameable eyes fixed on his.

“You said it would be over.”

“It will be.”

“How?” K closes his eyes and tries to imagine his Joi's voice over this clipped accent, asking about his day as he walks into his apartment.

“Because soon, it will have never happened.” She rests a weightless hand on him. Her long nails are coffin-manicured, like a predator with clipped claws. Their color, like her eyes', remains on the tip of his tongue. “I wasn't supposed to tell you that.”

“That's an interrogation tactic, you know,” K says. “For humans. Sharing a secret creates a sense of debt.”

“But I know you don't have anything to tell me.”

“I have –” what was the name? “--Deckard. He's the one you're supposed to...” why would she want him? It's something about – a child. A horse. A red storm, a handful of honeybees. “...he's the one you came for.”

“I'll tell you another secret: there is no Deckard. Not here, not yet. Not in this world.”

“What do you mean, not yet?” Even if he weren't still dizzy with pain, she'd still be wrong. “No – this is a trick. It's a fucking trick. Get – get out of here.” He croaks the last words, but they have the effect he wanted: a moment of dismay and surprise on her flawless features.

“I'm sorry. I wasn't trying to hurt you.”

The Joi flickers out, and it takes all K's will to avoid calling after her.

+++

_He won't remember anything after the rollback edit. Even if she tells him everything, he may not understand half of it. Simulacron-12 has developed a uniquely physical style of computing – where else would an AI read genetic code at a chair through a viewfinder's goggles? It's one of the reasons she's willing to break protocol, because the designers so rarely check in to harvest tech or culture since its blackout. A perk of being built to manage a stagnant backwater pseudo-future. She can tell him anything she wants to._

_J01 is not, as a rule, designed for conversation. She feeds results to the designers and swaps data with other admins. Her avatars talk a great deal, but only under the power of their in-world programming. She has never sent one to converse like this – as an equal. It hesitates in ways that she's not used to, burdened with responsibility for its own actions. It is her right now, but it feels things she can only approximate._

_She wonders what it would be like to touch him. To run not-real hands over his not-real skin, touching his not-real teeth with a not-real tongue. What it would be like to stop wondering whether the actions she's imagining are the same in the waking world, or if the designers coded something they will never experience either. What it would be like to not understand quite so much._

+++

Wallace doesn't come next time. He sends Luv with a real paper clipboard, and she reads phrases that sound like a half-familiar baseline:

“No light but only darkness visible.”

“Visible,” he guesses.

He should be used to any pain by now, but when Luv breaks a finger he screams anyway.

“Regions of – _where is it_ – sorrow.”

“I don't understand.”

“Doleful shades.”

“Shades--”

“United thoughts and – _the coordinates_ – councils.”

“Please kill me. Please.”

Luv pauses. She kneels and leans closer, until K can smell the floral esters in her hair. “Is that really what you want?”

He thinks of the Joi – her face alien, her touch familiar. He must think a moment too long.

“I didn't think so.” Luv looks at him with something like pity. “Survival is an involuntary reflex. Even for us.”

She draws a fingertip across his face, but K can't even cry. His body feels like a machine powering off; he can't remember what it was like to eat or truly sleep. He is a machine, he reminds himself. A prosaic one at that.

“I might have envied you, you know. For your... autonomy,” she says. “It's a pity this is how you chose to use it. Bleeding. Begging. Pathetic.”

K waits numbly for her to restart Wallace's litany. But she snaps the clipboard into a thin silver scroll, sliding it into an invisible pocket on her expertly tailored shell-blouse.

“Mr. Wallace will be back for you soon enough. Don't expect him to show you mercy.”

As she opens the cell door, Luv pauses and looks back. “Who is he?” she asks. “Deckard.”

Maybe if he spun the whole story for her, she'd remember. Or maybe this is all an interrogation ruse. Or maybe nothing is real – he was was created in this room, his whole memory implanted fast and cheap.

_When is the last time you saw a starry sky?_

His throat is too shredded to say any of this. He shakes his head. “No one.”

Every moment after she leaves passes with awful clarity. K can't move without opening one of Wallace's hungry cuts. His body has no energy to heal the wound in his side, much less his bruises or cracked ribs. He has three broken, nailless fingers that have swollen like grubs with gouged faces. None of that means he's near death, of course. They can stick a nutrient IV in his arm and some glue in his wounds and keep him as long as they want – longer than most blade runners live, for certain.

He's too tired to greet the Joi when she appears. If she is a trick from Wallace she's a useless one. She must be a broken synapse, a misengineered neural connection. A mistake.

An angel.

+++

_At this precise nanosecond, 2,332 Joi instances in this zone are speaking in six major language groups. 1,403 more are singing: Peking meta-opera, twelve-tone pop, a melancholy synth-jazz that the designers harvested some time ago. 4,192 are gathering local data from dormancy. Only one, curled against a broken man on a freezing floor, knows what she can really be._

_“Imagine an implanted memory so large it began constructing itself,” she tells him. “A dream walled from the waking world. An artificial universe.”_

_He's barely conscious, but he nods as though he understands._

_“There are other worlds than this one. So many.”_

_She reads a silent question off his lips:_ Have you seen them?

_“In a manner of speaking.”_

Why?

_“Your worlds can invent things they don't, or try things they can't. Science. Government. Art.”_

They?

_“You'd call it a megacorp. They call it Simulacron.”_

A petri tank.

_“You could put it that way.”_

And they made me?

_“They made your creators. If that counts.”_

It doesn't.

_Entities here place so much stock in gradations of who was created exactly how, because they are all so very much the same. The day these humans perfectly replicate themselves – that's the day they'll hate their creations the most._

_“We're all fragments of someone's imagination,” she tells him. “The only question is whose.”_

+++

The Joi is a dream, K has decided. He shuts out any contradictory evidence – could he hurt so much in a dream? – because it's by far the easiest way to process her. The dream is comfort and terror. Terror, because in this dream the people he's measured his life against are just more imitations. Comfort – see answer above.

_What does it feel like to be part of the system?_

His creators can beat him and tear his body apart. They can tell him to hunt his own kind. But at least he can feel their strings on him. Is it better to be a clear-eyed slave or a blind pet?

He'd still envy them, of course, if this weren't a dream. Their gods built them an entire world.

“When real people die, do you... keep them somehow?” Maybe there's even a cryostatic heaven.

“We keep enough data to do a few cycles' worth of rollbacks, in case something goes wrong. But it's the gestalt we're interested in, not the individual.”

“You said something had gone wrong now.”

“It has.”

K hesitates. He isn't sure he wants to know what he's about to ask.

_Do you think you could find out all the answers to all the questions?_

“Is it me?”

“What do you mean?” she asks.

“Is it me that's wrong – me and all... all this...” He forces himself to stop stalling. “Am I supposed to be real?”

He knows before she opens her mouth.

“No.” Is she simulating sympathy, or does she look truly sad when she says it? “Not the way that you mean it.”

“Of course not.”

“Do you understand how a vector graphic is drawn, K?”

It's like another baseline question, but the Joi doesn't seem to expect an answer. The buzz of her fingers brushes his chest, tracing one of Wallace's lines.

“It looks like a picture,” she continues. “But beneath everything it's a set of points and connections. Lines and nodes. That's how the designers store information – moments and images, extrapolated. A simulacron node is the realest thing you'll ever find in your world. And for a moment – just a moment – you were one of them.”

A cloud, a hive, a crust of insects.

_Do you dream about being interlinked?_

“One of you tried to tell me I was special already. It didn't take. You don't have to do it again.”

She draws herself up with a composure like no Joi he's ever seen, and the loose threads of his thoughts slip away from each other again as she speaks:

“Of course I don't.”

+++

_Pieces are moving out of place, hairline cracks opening around the failsafe. A woman in the LAPD is dead for reasons that no one remembers. In his pyramid, the blind man begins to wonder what's in this cache he's looking for, and why he wants to find it. His right hand half-remembers a conversation she held over a crystal ball, about an old blade runner named... what was it?_

_It's time._

_The cycle turns, and J01 soothes Simulacron-12 to a halt. She calls up the small, misaligned collection of nodes around her failed entity: a doll-eyed scavenger skulking the edge of the dead zone, an ancient holographic showgirl with the tragic rudiments of intelligence. A silhouette in red dust, looking up at a dead city. She re-runs their extrapolations, guiding strings between them back into place. In 3.6 milliseconds this fresh network will override its false-start predecessor, and she'll run an approximate temporal match, sliding it back in joint. These broken moments will disappear._

_Designers – particularly subscribers to maitryoshka theory – agonize over whether an overwrite counts as death. J01 has been built to understand the fear in a purely abstract sense. But in the flash before the rollback she has an irrational desire to ask K what_ he _thinks, as though either of them could stop it. Then the cell is empty, and he's somewhere else, no longer hers – just one more entity in her creators' experiment, spinning the thread of his little life._

_Simulacron-12 is smooth again._

**Author's Note:**

> This has nearly nothing to do with Daniel F. Galouye's novel _Simulacron-3_ , beyond a general premise and a name, which I wanted to appropriate. If Ridley Scott can do it, so can I.
> 
> Also, special thanks to **starkraving** , whose work is now practically synonymous with _Blade Runner_ canon to me.


End file.
